How do you determine your editorial line?
Following on from our CMS tutorials, here are a few useful tips for defining your editorial line. It's essential to define one before writing content for the media, on your site or on social networks. To communicate, is it enough to publish content about whatever comes into your head from time to time? No. The pace, nature, tone and angle of your content are crucial.
How do you define your editorial line?
Upstream thinking
To structure your communication activities, you need to ask yourself three questions beforehand:
- What are you writing for?
- Who are you writing for?
- From what angle are you writing?
What is an editorial line?
The answers to these three questions will help you to define :
- your content ;
- your target audience ;
- the tone to adopt.
These three elements are the basic components of an editorial line.
What are your communication objectives?
The profitability issue
Yes, you can communicate. But you still need to know what your objectives are in terms of profitability! Because communicating takes time, or represents a cost if you outsource.
So the communication you deploy must serve a concrete, measurable objective that is useful to the company.
Your ultimate objective
Your communication may pursue different objectives. The important thing is to identify them in order to determine how you will communicate.
The objective may be to :
- acquire new customers ;
- expanding your network of influence
- inform your partners of your latest news;
- and so on.
Hence the importance of good natural referencing (SEO) of your texts!
Five principles to follow when choosing your editorial line
Adapt to your target audience
The target audience and the nature and angle of your editorial content should flow naturally from your objectives. It might be a good idea to tell your partners about your latest news, for example.
For prospective customers, the idea will be to demonstrate your expertise, through success stories for example, or through sector-specific themes that concern them and in which you have experience.
Establish a framework
By developing your editorial line and writing strategy in line with clear objectives, you can be sure of structuring a consistent approach over time.
Because in communications, almost everything is a question of endurance. So you need to establish a framework and stick to it.
Building reader loyalty
How do you keep your readers loyal? Your editorial line needs to be clear so that they can understand it and know what to expect.
This way, as soon as you coincide with their interests, they will have "spotted" you and will follow your future publications.
Organising your content
Over time, your content will become increasingly numerous. Your readers need to be able to easily find the content that interests them.
That's why you need to provide relevant indexing, using well thought-out categories or a fluid keyword system.
Keeping up to date
Although you need to set yourself a course of action and stick to it, don't fall into the predictable. Surprise your readers and alternate the type of publications you produce.
Alternate between in-depth articles, news briefs and infographics, for example.
How can you orchestrate your communication activities?
Keeping a blog
Many companies apply a content marketing strategy on the web by keeping a blog.
They manage it using a CMS (Content Management System) such as Wordpress, Hubspot, CmonSite or SiteW.
Creating a newsletter
Sending a newsletter at regular intervals to your contacts is an excellent way of maintaining the link.
If you run a blog, the best way to do this is to include some of the content that has been published recently in your email.
Better still, you can personalise this selection for each of your recipients. ExpertSender software allows you to do this with behavioural segmentation, or Send-Up to a lesser extent.
Communicate on social networks
Social media is a powerful lever. Depending on your business, practices in your sector and your customers' habits, identify the social networks that are best suited to your company: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn?
But beware: community management can quickly become time-consuming. Use a tool to simplify management. There are Hootsuite, Buffer and Agorapulse, which are all highly specialised in this area.
Coordinating a multi-channel marketing strategy
Orchestrating your communication across different channels can be a real headache. To avoid being overwhelmed, marketing automation features are invaluable.
It involves considering all the channels and defining the actions to be automated upstream. In this way, your company sets up a high-performance funnel as part of an inbound marketing approach.
It is essential to define an editorial line to guide your communication actions. Whether in the press, on the radio or on the web, your editorial content must be consistent and easy to read, guaranteed by this global approach.
Article translated from French